Pinterest also started rolling out its first buyable pins, a big step forward in its goal of becoming the visual search and discovery engine where users start looking when they have a glimmer of an idea of what they want to buy.

None of these things are immediately catastrophic for Google.

Losing the AOL deal is only "tens of millions" of dollars that Google won't make every few months — a drop in the bucket compared to the $17.26 billion in revenue it reeled in last quarter. And even though Facebook is becoming a bigger magnet for video ad dollars, YouTube is still enormous and much more established with advertisers. Pinterest's ad products are still relatively new, and Google is on the cusp of launching its own "Buy" button, too.

While Pinterest might just be beginning to capture visual search and subsequently up its ad offerings, Amazon's been yanking product searches away from Google for years. Desktop product search queries on Amazon increased 47% between September 2013 and September 2014, according to ComScore, threatening Google's especially lucrative kind of search advertising.